Thubten Wangchen
Tibetan Buddhist Monk
Venerable Thubten Wangchen is a Tibetan Buddhist monk and a student of the Dalai Lama. He was born in 1954 in Kyirong in Tibet and left as a child in 1959, spending his early years as a refugee before studying language, history and Buddhist philosophy at a Tibetan school in Dalhousie in India. On the Dalai Lama's advice he founded the Casa del Tibet in Barcelona, whose premises the Dalai Lama inaugurated in December 1994, and which he has directed since, working to make Tibetan culture and Buddhist teaching known in Spain. He is a member of the Tibetan Parliament in Exile, and has long campaigned on human rights in Tibet.